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| Week Ending 2nd September |
| Once we recovered from our Irish trip, you know: laundry, catching up on mail, sleep and that sort of thing; we had to give some serious thought to our return to the US. Actually Nancy has given considerable thought to returning and has started (continued) buying things to take home. Ever since we landed we have searched for those souvenirs that would be most memorable. We have picked up a couple of small etchings that depict Bristol and Friday (a week ago) we went to an art gallery and picked up a beautiful drawing of the SS Great Britain being towed up the River Avon and under the landmark suspension bridge. The ship was being returned from the Falkland Islands for it's fabulous restoration. This Friday we went out to a glass shop to pick up some unique window glass that we saw in many of the older houses in the Midlands. The small panes of glass are heated and formed in a mold that makes a target-like pattern. Monday, 28/8, was a bank holiday. John and Eve invited us for an outing to the Westonbirt Arboretum, http://www.forestry.gov.uk/westonbirt. There was a special show featuring woodcarvers, Festival of the Tree. Every year the arboretum collects the downed trees, wind fallen branches and prunings and offers them to wood carvers of note. The wood carvers have a week to carve the wood and present them for judging. Most of the woodcarvings are suitable for gardens. The woodcarvings are then auctioned as a fund raiser for the Arboretum. |
| John and Eve were not prepared for the popularity of the Festival. It has been several years since they had attended and this time there were masses of people. Everyone was well behaved, but the distance in from the parking lot was a fair jaunt. Many different woodworking organizations and companies were represented with booths and displays. In addition to the woodworkers, the crowd was entertained by a troop of Morris Dancers, http://www.morrisdancers.com/. Morris Dancing is an English thing. The "art" is somewhat freeform and there doesn't seem to be any standardization in either costume or form. The only common element I could see was that they all seem to carry sticks or clubs and do a lot of banging and clacking |
| Although the weather was threatening at times, everything turned out quite pleasant with never a drop whenever we were exposed. It was a good outing. On of the things on our list of things to do has been to go out on a boat on the floating harbor. Our original plan was to take either the Harbor Taxi or one of the various harbor cruises, but when our neighbor, Trevor, revealed that he had a narrow boat and would love to take us out, our aspiration changed entirely. The only problem has been finding a good time. As our time in England has grown shorter we have become less critical of the ideal weather and have accepted a time regardless of the weather - turned out lucky and the weather was not an issue. |
| We have found that a common summer weather pattern here is for the mornings to be clear and bright and late afternoons subject to severe changes - sometimes thunderstorms. Trevor's outing was set for Sunday morning and he invited several other neighbors. It was a very pleasant little party. We are quite familiar with the part of the harbor below the Prince Street Bridge and have walked the shores many times, but beyond that was new territory. We poked into the Bathurst Basin, a manmade harbor that at one time had its own lock to the River Avon. Then we traveled up past the train station, Temple Mead, to where the channel narrows and then turned around. The trip was very picturesque and showed a view of Bristol we hadn't seen. |
| Willow herself is an amazing craft. She is flat bottom, steel hulled with a diesel engine and beautifully fitted on below decks. I would have accepted her age at anything up to a hundred years and was amazed that she was only a couple of years old. Willow has her own website: http://www.OnMyBoat.co.uk We had a great tour of the harbor and hope to have the opportunity of another offered cruise before the end of our time here |
| We must be pretty close to being adapted to English weather. On Thursday we took the bus to London. The air temperature soared to 20°C (68°F) and we both sweated most of the day. Admittedly, the air-conditioner on the coach to London was on the fritz, but that wouldn't explain our "hots" while in London. A day-trip to London is ideal for us. We go in saw what we want to see - and return to the comforts of own flat for the evening. It's 2.5 hours each way on the bus, so makes a nice day. Thursday's target was the Victoria and Albert Museum. The focus of the V&A museum is reportly costumes and decorative art. Across the street is the Natural History Museum. Therefore, Nancy could go see dresses and stuff and Jerry could go see dinosaurs. Or at least that was the plan. We got to the V&A about 10:30 and started with a cup of tea and a scone. Jerry delayed running over to the Natural History Museum, since the V&A offered an overview tour. The overview, as it turned out, was well worth the time since the Museum turned out to be different than we had been lead to expect. The tour started in the Grand Entrance. The glass chandelier was designed by a glass blower from Seattle. |
| Our docent was a very cultured older woman. She, like most of the other docents we have met in England, loved her museum and carried on to considerable lengths about the virtues of its artifacts. The extent of the collection was overwhelming. There were collections of British artifacts: ceramics, silver, furniture, jewelry, sculpture and more. There was one room that had copies of every famous sculpture that you could think of, including Michelangelo?s David. In addition their were collection from all over the world: China, India, Arabia, everywhere. |
| Before the time of cheap and easy transportation for art students to go to Rome to learn and copy the art there, fabulous copies were collected and exchange by the various European museums for this purpose. One exception was the statue of David. David was a gift to Queen Victoria. Knowing Queen Victoria's attitude toward nudity, the giver had sculpted a fig leaf to fit over the offensive body part. The statue was fitted with the fig leaf whenever the Queen visited the museum. The museum still stores the fig leaf behind the statue. After the tour, we had lunch at the café in the V&A. Then we split up. Nancy went to see some of the textile displays within the V&A and I went next door to the Natural Museum. Both the V&A and the Natural Museum are huge. Each museum covers a city block. To truly see everything in the V&A would take at least a week. They said there were 8.5 miles of corridors in the V&A alone. The first thing that impressed me upon entering the Natural History Museum, after the huge dinosaur skeleton in the main lobby, was the number of people with kids. This was the last week of summer vacation and everyone was trying to crowd one more thing into the summer. I headed for the paleontology display, but so did half the world. The line was long and very slow moving. The room had an impressive room displaying various and assorted sizes and shapes of dinosaur skeletons leading to a chamber that contained a 2/3 sized fully articulated model of a Tyrannosaurus Rex. I have to congratulate the museum on their presentation but having to battle the crowds left me less than awed. I may have been over exposed to dinosaurs. |
| The next display was a comparative display of the modern world's mammals. In a room full of elephants and giraffes and every large animal you can think of, the blue whale dwarfed them all. I'm not sure what the museum was trying to demonstrate with this exhibit; the message I got was that whales are big |
| Nancy and I had agreed to meet at the door to the Natural History Museum at three o'clock, so I started in that direction and past a display on more recent fossils including saber tooth tigers, alligators and an armadillo that had to be three or four feet in diameter. I literally ran into Nancy in one of the halls on my way out of the museum. She had finish with the V&A early as 80% of the textile displays she had specifically wanted to see had been removed for remodeling. She was curious about the Natural History Museum, too, and had come to see what was available. We decided not to fight the crowds and left. On the way out we passed a tent set up on the front lawn and had to peek in. In the tent was an archeological dig for kids. For a fee the kids were encouraged to uncover and document various buried artifacts - the kids had brushes and safety glasses, so they looked like archeologists! They had clipboards to draw what they had "found." Looked like fun and the kids were having a great time. We headed for Harrods and did a little shopping. We had a leisurely walk through Hyde Park, a cup of tea at the Speaker's corner, and met our coach for home. We were ready. The ride home was uneventful and since the coach had several riders destined for points southwest of Bristol and it was going to travel down Hotwells Road anyway, we asked him to drop us off practically at our front door. The Chinese take-out down the street provided a quick and easy dinner. All in all a good day, even though it didn't meet our expectations. We'll wait until the kids are back in school before our next trip to London. We still want to see Covent Gardens, The British Museum, the Greenwich Meridian, Churchill's War Rooms. Probably can get most in one or two more trips. |
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| We poked into the bay at City Center The Castle Park is dead ahead with the old Brewery with the Watershed Pub on the right on the left |
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| The entrance features this hugh, very modern, glass sculputre with the balcony showing an antique screen, rescued from a church remoding at some time in the past. The bed above is the defining piece for the museum, "The Bed of Ware". Ten feed square and the height of medeval elegance. |
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